Author Archives: Claire Bateman

“Any one of these days can be the new first day, Day One, where things seem to be going well. No problem. Any missed understanding can be beginner’s luck, it can be even better than you intended, a kind of innocent perfection. I’ve read a climbing perch can live on land for up to six […]

“The novel I finished reading/last night/in my system like a drug,/a hangover, numbing, dulling,/but for something dark, unseen,/some residue, some fated turn./I have outlived myself,/what now?”—Patricia Waters Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—June 2018—Patricia Waters was born and reared in Nashville, Tennessee, took her undergraduate degree at what was then Memphis State, […]

“It’s as if our home yearns to satisfy us, although lately dinner’s been perfunctory and the dusting lackluster. In this, we sense our home’s human ambition, its human distraction. Tonight, we will loan it our bad dreams; maybe then it will seek comfort in folding and putting away, in wiping clean the patio doors, in […]

“I soaked up like a sponge/my mother’s Thirties ethic: Throw away/nothing! Yet somehow, out of the blue,/here you are, a spendthrift, prodigal, clean/break with your ancestral line, a brush/with risk and danger.”—Maryann Corbett Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—March 2018—Poet Maryann Corbett was born in Washington DC, grew up in McLean, Virginia, […]

“We often hear the word quirky applied to contemporary poets (just glance at five random blurbs, you’re sure to find quirky), but perhaps no one writing today inhabits the word quite as fully as Bateman. The premises of her poems are apparently beamed into the atmosphere at a slant from another, logically slippery dimension—yet once […]

“Love is strange and calls me to stranger things/When I was young I thought that I’d know why./I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”—Luke Hankins Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—January 2018—Luke Hankins was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1984 and grew up in Pineville, Louisiana before moving to his current […]

“There were three girls jumping/double dutch on the blacktop below/him, and he looked down because/even their voices sounded nimble.”—Charlotte Matthews Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2017—Charlotte Matthews’ most recent book Whistle What Can’t Be Said (2016) chronicles part of her experience with Stage III breast cancer. In addition, she is author of […]

“Write what you know, my first teachers suggested. But I have never been a big fan of reality. Reality feels like sandpaper on my skin. Sometimes I think I would love to escape the everyday world, and just move into the imagination forever.”—Nin Andrews Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—November 2017—In a […]

  “So they all went to get their digging spoons, and set to work, the eldest with his sterling silver baby spoon from very long ago; the middle child with her sea-shell-shaped sugar spoon; and the youngest child with the runcible spoon. They dug for a while, and then they took off their sweaters and […]

“When I was in Timişoara, Romania, I discovered these beautiful, tall churches made of mud and straw with exaggeratedly steep roofs. The churches, however, were so small inside they were almost of no use. I asked a peasant why they were made this way. He told me that ‘One grows slender when approaching God.’”—Mark Irwin […]